Abstract
Conductive porous carbon nanofibers are promising for environmental, energy, and catalysis applications. However, increasing their porosity and conductivity simultaneously remains challenging. Here we report chemical crosslinking electrospinning, a macro–micro dual-phase separation method, to synthesize continuous porous carbon nanofibers with ultrahigh porosity of >80% and outstanding conductivity of 980 S cm−1. With boric acid as the crosslinking agent, poly(tetrafluoroethylene) and poly(vinyl alcohol) are crosslinked together to form water-sol webs, which are then electrospun into fibrous films. After oxidation and pyrolysis, the as-spun fibers are converted into B-F-N triply doped porous carbon nanofibers with well-controlled macro–meso–micro pores and large surface areas of ~750 m2 g−1. The sponge-like porous carbon nanofibers with substantially reduced mass transfer resistances exhibit multifunction in terms of gas adsorption, sewage disposal, liquid storage, supercapacitors, and batteries. The reported approach allows green synthesis of high-performance porous carbon nanofibers as a new platform material for numerous applications.
Highlights
Conductive porous carbon nanofibers are promising for environmental, energy, and catalysis applications
When the diameter of fibers decreases from micro to nanoscale, the diameter refinement endowed carbon nanofibers (CNFs) unique thermal and electrical properties, making them popular in various fields such as environmental and energy applications[4,5]
CNFs (PCNFs), but increasing porosity and conductivity of CNFs simultaneously is regarded as an open problem, as conductivity is generally inversely proportional to pore volumes[6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]
Summary
Conductive porous carbon nanofibers are promising for environmental, energy, and catalysis applications. Increasing their porosity and conductivity simultaneously remains challenging. CNFs (PCNFs), but increasing porosity and conductivity of CNFs simultaneously is regarded as an open problem, as conductivity is generally inversely proportional to pore volumes[6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]. The concept of freestanding electrode has been reported in a number of papers[15,16,17,18] This concept is not practical to advance into commercial manufacturing, as most of these PCNFs have low conductivity of
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